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Thomas Pettigrew is currently Research Professor of Social Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has also taught at the Universities of North Carolina (1956-1957), Harvard (1957-1980), and Amsterdam (1986-1991). In addition, he has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1975-76), the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (1984-85) and the Research Institute for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University (2001-2002).

With more then 500 publications, Professor Pettigrew has been at the forefront of research on racial prejudice for a half-century. An expert on black-white relations in the United States, he has also conducted intergroup research in Australia, Europe, and South Africa. He served as President of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues in 1967-1968 and later received the Society's Kurt Lewin Award (1987) and twice its Gordon Allport Intergroup Research Award (1987 and 2003). Other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1967-68) ,the Sydney Spivack Award for Race Relations Research from the American Sociological Association (1979), the 2002 Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, a Senior Fulbright Fellowship (2003-2004), the 2009 Panunzio Award of the University of California for outstanding research by an Emeritus Professor, and the 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Academy for Intercultural Research. In 2008, he received an honorary doctorate from Philipps University in Marburg, Germany. In 2010, Pettigrew received both the Harold Lasswell Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society of Political Psychology and the Ralph White Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict and Violence. The Sociological Practice and Public Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association presented Pettigrew with the William Foote Whyte Distinguished Career Award in 2011. The following year the Society for Personality and Social Psychology honored him with one of its first Lifetime Career Contribution Awards. In 2014, he received the Cooley-Mead Award - the highest social psychological award of the American Sociological Association. In 2016 the American Sociological Association presented him with the Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award for lifetime contributions to the study and advancement of American race relations. In 2017, he was awarded the Centennial Medal of the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in recognition of significant contributions to society. And in 2018, he received with Linda Tropp The Scientific Impact Award of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology for our 2006 meta-analysis of intergroup contact effects.

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Primary Interests:

Aggression, Conflict, Peace

Attitudes and Beliefs

Culture and Ethnicity

Group Processes

Intergroup Relations

Political Psychology

Prejudice and Stereotyping

Research Methods, Assessment

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Other Publications:

Pettigrew, T. F. (2017). The intertwined history of personality and social psychology.
In K. Deaux and M. Snyder (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Personality and Social
Psychology. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.